I didn't really mean for this to turn into a general art blog.

Delwin has a glow beetle!

I guess I'm just rolling with it, though, and I will try to resume the 365 projects but it's kind of nice to have somewhere else to share my general art, too. I have been busy. On the drawing front, I joined an online RP that's very art-centric, reusing an old character of mine, a little centaur boy named Delwin.
He's kind of challenging to draw, because I struggle with drawing children, but he's fun to play because the psychology of kids is fascinating. I guess I'll be drawing him a lot, and I'm pushing myself to do more digital painting experimentation with him.

In other not-so-fun news, all of my artistic output has been severely dampened for weeks and weeks now by an outbreak of hives. We think it's an allergic reaction to a new medication, which I have since stopped taking, but there's apparently no good timetable for how long it takes to work its way out of your system.
If it's not a reaction to the medication, then it means I've spontaneously developed an allergy to something that's consistently in my environment, and that will be utter hell to work out. I'm currently on my second dose of Prednisone to try to shake this off. A lot of the hives are on my arms and hands, which has made it almost impossible to so much as hold a pencil, some days. Using scissors is hard. I can't practice the guitar. It's obnoxious and frustrating and makes me want to be creative all the more just because I'm having so much trouble physically doing anything.

And yet, I've still been managing to get stuff done, sometimes painfully. Inspired by the cubed bird, I've been making these guys we've dubbed 'SquareCrows' to sell for Halloween, both at the local Farmer's Market and on our Etsy shop. The largest there is a cube three inches to a side, the medium-size one is a two-inch cube, and the tiny one is one-and-a-half inches to a side because I cut out a one-inch square and took one look at it and decided I'm not quite that insane. They're all felt, all hand sewn with embroidery floss because we were out of orange thread, and I've been scrounging for button eyes. We did find these packs of teeny tiny buttons that work for the littlest one, and may have to break down and buy a pack of buttons for the others because I've pretty much run our miscellaneous bags/jars of buttons out of orange. I've gotten lots of squealing comments and had a commission for a full trio plus one extra of the largest ones. Anybody who sees them here and wants some, drop me a line, because I'm still at work on more.
Mostly I'm grateful my hives today are mostly on the backs of my hands and I can still work...

Slow return

I guess I shouldn't have assumed I'd be ready to jump back into life just after the funeral. On top of it all I brought home some germs that rapidly devolved into being so sick I was pretty much non-functional the week after I got home. Even now I'm finishing up a course of antibiotics because it tried t turn into bronchitis.

Been drawing some, though, and  pushing myself to get back into the normal rhythms of things. I'm still looking for work, but I also stumbled on what might be an excellent site for getting illustration work, so I'm scrambling to put together a few pieces for a portfolio that would be appropriate to what they look for there. Freelance is scary, but being jobless is scarier.

That said, updates here may be slow, and while on the one hand I'd meant for this blog to be devoted to the 365 project,
on the other hand it's all art so I may continue posting my other work in between proper entries. Click either of the images here to see them full size on DeviantArt, where I keep my regular work.

As a side note, I sometimes worry that my art is so eclectic that nobody will ever be able to see something I've done and know it's mine. I vary so wildly in style and medium, because the concept always comes first to me, and the style and medium are in service to the idea. I think some artists (most artists?) have a style, and all of their ideas naturally emerge through that style, so you can look at any piece they've done and identify it as theirs.
Maybe I'm caring too much about getting credit for my art? I hope that's not selfish of me. Possibly if I got more people willing to place value on my art by paying for it as work I'd feel validated or something. Possibly because I've been out of work so long, art is the only thing left that gives me a sense of accomplishment I feel I can measure my worth against. Probably I should finish this post now, and go make some more art.

I will be gone for a week for my grandmother's funeral, and I'll try to get back to regular blogging after my return. Thanks to all who have the patience to still be watching this blog, and if you are, here's more filler art to tide you over.

Filler post

Some days you just get up on the wrong side of the bed, I guess, or something. This morning started with finding somebody had been in my car, and while they didn't take anything (there's nothing in it worth taking), the idea creeps me out and it's locked, tonight. I also didn't get the chance to eat until almost noon, because the earlier chance to eat I did get between appointments involved me discovering my bagels had gone moldy.
Nothing major, but I was tired on top of this, and I just haven't had the motivation to get very far with today's project, although I have worked on it a little.
In lieu of a formal 365 project, here's some older fanart of mine, for Alice in Wonderland. I used to be fascinated with the Mad Hatter and his claims that he knew Time personally, although they had a falling out. Here, then, is the Mad Hatter having tea with Time, possibly even that fateful moment when he said something about 'killing time' and was thus forever after cursed...
I used my own pocket watch for reference, because it opens on both sides, so this is specifically the backside of the workings.There's numbers and hands on the side the Hatter is seeing.

Day 33: Pens

Pens as inspiration got me back to thinking of drawing, and works I like that are done in pen. If you're not familiar with the works of Edward Gorey... well, you should be. His stuff is weird and twisted in such a quiet way. He writes and draws, sometimes stories that are unexpected or even unfathomable nonsense, other times delightfully dark poems and rhymes, and usually the illustrations and words rely on each other to the point where it's only half a step away from a graphic novel.
I have three Amphigorey books, which are big collections of his stuff. In their original form his little stories are sometimes hard to come by, so this is a good way to get your hands on as much of his work as possible.

Not actually the work of Edward Gorey...

The collection pictured here includes my girlfriend's favorite 'The Wugglyump', the very popular 'Gashlycrumb Tinies' (an alphabet of children deaths), the bizarrely kinky 'The Curious Sofa', and another popular tale, 'The Doubtful Guest'.
This last one is a rhyming story about a strange creature that shows up at a family home one day, wreaks minor destruction and confusion on a daily basis, and never leaves. It's a weirdly cute little beast, though, and the illustrations imply the family is resigned to living with it.
The couplet I've illustrated here is my own creation, but just the kind of thing it would do, and illustrated in the style of the original pictures. I used Prismacolor fine line markers, not a traditional dip pen, but in the vaguely Edwardian setting of the stories those seemed more appropriate.

My illustration beside Edward Gorey's original title page.

Day 28: School materials

I couldn't think of a better book to go with using school materials than 'Ghosts Who Went to School'. The copy I have now I think I got at a local used bookstore, but I bought it because I remembered reading it several times as a kid. The title is a pretty literal description of the main plot, but that doesn't cover how wonderfully weird a book this is. I've re-read it a number of times since I got it, and it's a really good book because although the language is simple, it's not patronizing or even overtly directed at children.
The story follows a family of ghosts, but most especially the younger of the two brothers. They and their parents all live in a house that's defaulted to the bank since the last of the family line living there died with no heirs and a mortgage. It's not your typical haunted house, because the ghosts are diligent about upkeep and even the lawn is mowed on a regular basis. Of course with yardwork being done regularly by ghosts, everyone in town has noticed the place is haunted and no one will buy it.

This makes for a pretty dull and lonely existence for the two children of the ghost family. At least they have each other, but there's no other children for them to play with. The older brother, Mortimer, is at least allowed to go out wandering town a little (with a curfew and his parent's foreknowledge), but the younger son Wilbur is considered too young to go out on his own and he gets bored when his brother goes off without him.
The story starts with Mortimer agreeing to take his little brother out to see Christmas decorations, and causing some trouble by sheer accident when they try to help decorate the town square's tree, and break up a fight between other kids.
After the Christmas holiday, the ghost boys convince their parents to let them go to school, partly for education and partly to give them something to do. Of course at first they go visit the local school invisibly, but they're starved for social interaction and can't quite keep from interfering and getting noticed. Because this is a kid's book, the main character Wilbur is ultimately accepted by classmates and teacher, and allowed to become a regular student. Almost regular. Wilbur's being a ghost makes for both trouble and advantages. When the class hamster escapes, he's able to go through the furniture to retrieve it, but when the class is visited by anyone else, like the principal or later a student teacher, it's a problem that Wilbur has trouble staying visible all the time. He tends to vanish when he's concentrating, which is exactly what he should be doing during lessons.

There's no question it's a kids story, because of the interactions and the kind of problems that come up, but it's got plenty of humor I can appreciate at any age. Towards the end of the book there's a school play on the history of the town, and Wilbur and Mortimer's parents become a reference for the script. When the accurate history brings to light some less flattering aspects of the great-grandfather of the town's historical busybody, she makes a fuss. After the play the ghosts appear to shut her up.
This might not be a great classic in the grand halls of literature, but I definitely recommend giving it a read.
Also, if these drawings look a little different than my usual, that's because I was copying the style of the illustrations to portray some moments in the book there were no illustrations for.

Day 11: Wrong hand

It took me a while to come up with a book for this prompt, which was to use your off hand. People who don't know me in person may not be aware I'm left handed, and very dominantly so. Apparently right from infancy I would reach across my body for things, just to use the left hand instead of the right. Of course I've tried things like writing my name with my right hand before, with near-illegible results. I was pretty much resigned to my drawing attempts for this to be disastrous.

Except they're not. I have no idea how I pulled this off, but I drew it during a very slow Farmer's Market this morning and people kept coming by and admiring it, without realizing I was essentially doing it all backwards and having trouble even holding the pencils. Add to that, I did no underlying rough sketch, because I assumed that would be pointless. It took me hours to do what I could have drawn with my left in ten minutes, but it's not bad at all.

Bad scanner. There are no lines on the paper.

'Dragonsong' is just one of the books in Anne McCaffrey's massive Pern series, and the first in the Harper Hall trilogy. I've had to buy all the books of this series I currently own, because my mother wasn't about to give up hers. This was the first of the Pern books I ever read, though, at her recommendation.
The main character, Menolly, is a gifted musician in a very male-dominated society, that forbids her from taking up music as a career. She could still practice it in private, of course, but the real final blow comes when her hand is grievously injured to the point where she never expects to be able to play an instrument again.
Drawing is as much a part of life for me as music is to her, and if my left hand were injured I'd be devastated. On the other hand, as painstaking as this drawing was, it shows me that I would be able to adapt, with effort. Menolly doesn't lose her gift with music, either.

If you're not familiar with the Pern series at all, the major feature that draws most people is the dragons. They're not really dragons, in the traditional sense, but actually psychic alien animals on an alien planet colonized by humans who've forgotten they ever came from another world. In addition to the aliens they call dragons, there's a smaller version called fire lizards. These have usually been feral animals, rarely spotted, but around the time of the story people are just starting to discover they can bond psychically to humans the way the larger dragons do. Menolly is witness to a hatching, and ends up psychically bonding with all nine of the survivors of the litter. That's a lot of fire lizards. I was very careful to draw all nine here, in the correct colors.
'Dragonsong' is not the first book in the Pern series, and I'm not technically sure what is, because there are prequels, but it's an excellent place to dive into their world.

Day 7: Stencils

I wussed out on yesterday, mostly due to the kind of sinus headache that makes it painful just to look at anything, but this is a Tuesday post, I swear. I finished this about midnight, even if it has taken me until 1 AM to get the pictures sorted out and post.

Today's (okay, Monday's) prompt was to make stencils and use them. I've never been good with stencils, no matter the size. I always end up with nothing but a big blotch when I pull them away. So of course I decided to be really insane and make teeny tiny stencils, which were probably doomed to failure.

On the other hand, what I made was supposed to look like an old carnival poster, probably screen-printed and mass produced. Flaws are acceptable. I have plans to color and weather/distress/age this, but not tonight. In fact, I have ideas for a whole big mixed-media painting of which this would only be a piece, so there may be a redux of all this at some future date.
For anyone curious, the stencils themselves were actually made by pasting some fancy decorative font characters, wingdings, and clipart into a document, printing it out on card stock, and cutting them out with an exacto blade. Some designs I had printed turned out to just be impossible to cut out at such small size, others I fudged on to make them work as stencils. I ended up doing the drawing all freehand, without much in the way of any sketch underneath, and it was done with a dip pen and india ink. I actually went through a phase in High School where I drew a whole lot that way, for a year or so, but I'm out of practice and my hand now hurts from the stippling. It took me pretty much all day, and obviously well into the night.

Tiny stencils doomed to failure.

Stencils had me thinking of simple iconic images, and somehow that led me to thinking of this book, 'The Manual of Detection'. There are a number of visual icons, and some of them are hidden in the poster here. It's a fantastically weird and kind of surreal novel, and I'm having trouble describing it at one in the morning. If there were a film made of it, then it would need to be directed by Terry Gilliam.
The setting is very film noir, kind of a bleak-sounding city, and the main character is a clerk who lives a life of dull repetition, although he actually seems very content with that. It's a detective novel, like the title would make you think, but it involves traveling in dreams and a lot of fantastic imagery, and the main threat to the city comes from a once-traveling carnival and its employees.
The character descriptions in the book are actually pretty loose, when it comes to practicals. It's one of those books where you've got no idea what most people's hair or eye color is, and even the central villain of the books is described as, I swear I'm not giving anything away here, 'squarish, dull, bored-looking'. Okay. That's not a lot to go on, for an artist. On the other hand I guess it gives you the freedom to imagine the characters however you want. The character descriptions might be vague, but there's a lot of other detailed imagery that sticks in my head, which is why I really do want to do a full painting. In the meantime, this first draft of the circus poster will have to do.

So. Much. Stippling. My hand hurts.

I owe this post to my friend Mel, who loaned me her copy of the book over a year ago. It took me a while to pick it up, but once I did I was sucked right in from the first few pages. When I asked her if she'd be willing to part with it, she made sad-eyes over the phone at me (don't ask how that works), so I had to return hers and buy my own copy. I'm glad I did. It's going on the shelf in a place of honor among my absolute favorites.
As soon as I'm finished reading it again, anyway...